WHEN ONE HAS RHYTHM OF TURNIP, DANCING AT SCHOOL PROM CAN HARDLY BE A SIN

The debate was heated. On one side, the allies of Satan assaulted an honored and long-established taboo. On the other, the forces of Good fought to preserve their chaste way of life.

Satan won. By a vote of 3-2, the School Board approved the first school- sponsored prom ever held in Ames, Okla.

The Rev. Fred Detrick, a former teacher and leader of the opposition, decried the decision, saying "a school dance is the birthplace of many immoral things."

Student dances, apparently, have changed since the finger-snapping class of '47 left Gesu High School in Miami. That part about finger-snapping is a lie. The class of '47 was a dull bunch.

Of its 52 members, I don't remember one drunk. We did have a guy who had access to marijuana, but he was a pariah, a jerk who wore high-pocket pants, thought football and basketball were dumb, and was shunned by almost everybody.

With that kind of background, our school dances couldn't have given birth to anything immoral if Salome led the Conga line.

At Gesu, social functions were held on the school roof, an all-purpose cement prairie that had a boxing ring and bleachers at one end and what served as a dance floor at the other.

The ring was the heart of college boxing in South Florida, scene of the University of Miami's duels with such fistic powers as Syracuse, Penn State and Michigan State. The dance floor was not as distinguished.

Friday night was the big social night. Under the stars. Talk about seeds of evil.

Everybody attended, but not necessarily to dance. Males gathered on one side of the roof, talked about cars, which nobody had, and threatened to cross the floor and ask somebody to trip the light fantastic, which nobody knew how to do.

Except the girls, who clustered on the other side of the roof and danced with each other.

Actually, a few male hotdogs could dance a little. That is, they could walk around the floor without injuring their partners. But just about the time they were ready to make their moves, Hawaiian War Chant would come blasting out of the speaker system for the fifth time.

So the girls would jitterbug with each other. Again.

Having less rhythm than a turnip, I looked for other ways to kill the evening. The best part of Friday nights was running the elevator up to the roof, which was fourth floors up. The elevator was a refugee from a Bela Lugosi movie, one of those creaking jobs with a noisy, folding metal gate and a manual control handle. The control looked like something a naval officer would pull while hollering "All ahead, full!" It required the touch of a brain surgeon.

The conveyance didn't just start up and stop. It lurched and shuddered. A rookie could jockey the thing for five minutes and never stop it within a foot of the floor he was trying to hit.

Prom night was different. It was held in the social hall in the church basement. There was no elevator to run. So I went into serious training. I've described the ordeal before -- riding buses for hours, studying the footprints in the ads that proclaimed, "If you can do this simple step, you too can go dancing."

That was another lie. Luckily, I had the ideal date. Mary McCarron, wittiest girl in the class, was a good sport with a high threshold of pain. When it was all over she walked like Matt Dillon's friend, Chester, but never complained.

They probably don't have an elevator at Ames High School. There are only 29 students in the combined junior and senior classes. There may not be an elevator within 25 miles of town. Ames has only 320 residents. And it's almost four times as big as its nearest neighbor, Isabella.

Without that kind of diversion, maybe lust and alcoholism would defile any school dance in rural Oklahoma. Imagine. Whooping it up until 10 p.m., then catching a bus up Highway 64 to The Breakers in Enid.